Lenovo’s tiny new Thinkpad may be a feat too late

Lenovo’s new Helix Thinkpad is an incredible feat of engineering – so much power in such a small package.

This digital life

John Davidson

It’s a remarkably clever feat of engineering that Lenovo has managed to pull off with its latest PC, the ThinkPad Helix. Somehow it’s managed to squeeze an entire, full-powered Ultrabook into something the size of a tablet, just half the usual Ultrabook size.

But has it been too clever by half in doing so? We’re divided here in the Labs, roughly by halves as it happens. Some of us think Lenovo has been too clever, and some of us think Lenovo has been just clever enough.

You see, the ThinkPad Helix is such a wonderful engineering feat that even staff at Intel – the driving force behind Ultrabooks and, not coincidentally, the maker of the chips that go into them – say they’re surprised Lenovo pulled it off. How do you squeeze a high-end, Core i7 processor into what is essentially just a tablet PC, and not have it melt in the user’s hands? It can’t have been easy, and clearly it wasn’t easy, because the Helix is only coming out now, months after similar (but much larger) convertible Ultrabooks, such as Dell’s XPS 12 Convertible, were released. It must have taken Lenovo ages to figure out how to build it.

And that’s where things get a little complicated for anyone thinking of buying a ThinkPad Helix. Next month Intel is due to launch the next generation of those chips that go into Ultrabooks, and the new chips look set to bring with them the greatest improvement in battery life and performance that Intel has ever pulled off.

The Core i3, i5 and i7 chips that will soon be appearing in PCs will use what’s known as “Haswell” chips, and Haswell will represent the first time in Intel’s history that its desktop-style processors have been designed with low power consumption as their number one priority. Previous generations of Core chips have had battery-saving measures added to them retrospectively, but Haswell has been all about the batteries since it was first conceived. People are talking about Haswell-based machines that can run for 24 hours on a single charge, though Intel itself has been talking about 10 to 12 hours of operation a single charge. (It’s possible that Intel’s talk of “all day” battery life for Haswell notebooks has been taken to mean “all day”, when in fact it probably just means “all working day”. But either way, it’s a big improvement.)

That’s not even mentioning the graphics improvements that users will see from Haswell machines, which Intel says should be at least twice as fast as the current generation, for the first time ever making Ultrabooks and tablets suitable for fairly serious gaming.

Haswell may make Helix a has been

You can see why this might trouble us when it comes to the Helix. Its engineering has been so time-consuming it’s pushed the release of the machine up against a new technology that could potentially make all that good work go to waste. A few months from now, building an Ultrabook that’s just as small as the Helix, and just as fast may not be such a feat at all.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, right now the Helix is quite a piece of work, the smallest high-performance convertible Ultrabook we’ve ever had in the Labs. It’s barely even an Ultrabook at all, it’s so small.

Though I should say, the Helix is only very small when you pull it apart and leave the keyboard at home. When you do that, you’ll have an 870 gram device in your hands, much lighter than the 1.3 kilos that an ultra-light Ultrabook typically weighs.

Add the keyboard, however, and the Helix weighs in at a disappointing 1.7 kilos. But there’s a reason the keyboard weighs so much. It’s got a second battery in it, which both improves the battery life of the device (and it certainly does need improving, coming in at just half the battery life of slower, Atom-based convertibles in our tests) and acts as a much-needed counter weight for the main tablet. When you use the Helix as a notebook, it feels quite top heavy, you see. You can still use it on your lap, but only just, and it would be topple over if the keyboard were any lighter.

The reason the main tablet part is weighty is because it’s got so much grunt in it. Despite being so small, the Helix we reviewed (the $3209, 2GHz Core i7 model) handily outperformed most other Ultrabooks we’ve reviewed these past few months, and vastly outperformed the Atom-based convertibles we’ve been reviewing.

Right now, it’s probably the notebook-cum-tablet of choice for anyone who travels a lot and needs a high-performance device. The trouble is, right now might not last very long.

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The Australian Financial Review

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.